Chester Rebeiro

Indian Institute of Technology Madras

Title:

Differential Fault Attacks on Block Ciphers and their Automation

Abstract:

Embedded devices are highly vulnerable to a class of side-channel attacks known as Differential Fault Analysis (DFA). These attacks induce precisely timed and placed faults to retrieve secret information from devices. For instance, breaking encryption algorithms like the AES takes a few seconds and only needs a single fault. Naively protecting these devices incur huge overheads, while applying optimized countermeasures is laborious and requires considerable knowledge about the attacks.In this talk, we will first introduce Differential Fault Attacks on Block ciphers and demonstrate how the secret key can be obtained within a few minutes. We show how the position of the fault can influence the potency of the fault attack. We then present our efforts at designing automated tools that can identify and vulnerable operations in a cipher. These tools can be incorporated in compilers and during hardware design to synthesize secure block cipher implementations.

Bio:

Chester Rebeiro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He received a PhD degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India, and was a Post-Doctoral Scientist at Columbia University, New York. Before his PhD, he worked as Member Technical Staff at CDAC Bangalore. His research interests include hardware and operating systems security and applied cryptography.​

https://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~chester/